This is a shovel, a double shovel, double shovel.
It's on a line from Martin Luther King's "Letter
From a Birmingham Jail."
It's kind of-- but anyway.
I was-- there was a man I know who was in jail,
I think, probably for about six years.
And he kept-- he was in love with a woman, who,
because he was in jail and for the reason he was in jail,
she left him and took up with somebody else.
And I just remember how wounded he was for so long.
So this was for him.
Prayers toward home, spat through your numb, tired,
grizzled, and fog can't do what long nights conjuring
the scarlet outline of a woman can do.
No amens.
Or else, pray solid things, a plump canteen,
pink shards of meat bobbing in the can,
and poisons that move slow.
The daydreamed hand that drags your crave, just one
thought, that one recollected touch
could drop you where you stand.
It could do long hurt to your obsessed measuring of days.
Everything rots at the end of when.
Think mayhem in the body.
Think on the plotting drown of the she and he.
Letters returned spritzed with a heat that can't be reached.
The way back to her is long.
And all the roads are water.
Want for solid things.
If you must be alone, write her tangled name
on a deadened inch of your face.
It's better to be shut in than shut down, better backhanded
than cracked wide, better a fool than a--
stop your narrow cell.
Tally years.
Knit muscle.
Open your thudding chest to find that other jail,
jail of feigned passions, slow trample, crusher of wanderlust.
In your cell, narrow, bleached wrong, and scrubbed of its sun,
you are such a broken other, a keyless trill numbed artist
of her mouth.
What fool would rather be here than in the circle
of gone arms?
It's been six years.
You write and write and write, alone
again against the backdrop that you've clawed alive.
Your plea, runs long, is choked on roses.
She must be rattled by your scribbled reach for her
in letters he--
the he who isn't you--
reads aloud in bed with just the brightest pity.
Think, when was she here?
Her eyes locked on a space over your shoulder.
How long do you think you can leak all her silver and live?
Push those thoughts one last time
toward without then to within, where your brothers will
and can deliver.
Link arms with them and let them teach you how to really pray.
Else, you will lose them too, your men of spittle and scar.
They've known so long what you didn't.
For 13 years, you were already home.
They heard your prayers.